Add a NAS drive to your Livedrive account for free

I used to be a customer of popular cloud backup service Livedrive. The upload and download speeds were nothing to shout about and one annoyance was having to pay extra to add a NAS drive to your account, but there is a workaround!

How so?

All you need to do is add a symbolic link to your NAS drive from your computer. Think of a symbolic link as a fancy shortcut, the only difference being it masks the destination instead of taking you straight there – you’ll see what I mean when you read on.

Imagine you have a Windows computer with your NAS drive with the root of the drive already mapped to Z:, you have a folder on your NAS called MyFiles and would be able to browse to Z:\MyFiles to see whatever is stored there. Next imagine we have a folder called C:\Backup which is already uploading to your Livedrive account, using the following command we will make C:\Backup\MyFiles lead to your NAS and in turn be included with your Livedrive backup.

mklink /d "C:\Backup\MyFiles" "Z:\MyFiles"

For me, this worked absolutely fine and I had a couple of TB uploaded without ever being caught out. I’ve since jumped ship to Amazon Drive, whilst it is more expensive per year I’ve got it running from multiple computers and the upload and download speed always tops out my connection, so I can’t complain!

Notes

Use the above guide at your own risk – I won’t be held liable if anything happens to your Livedrive account, files or anything else because of this!

This doesn’t work with Dropbox or Google Drive – sorry

You only need to run the command once, after that the link will be remembered

To remove the link just delete it as you would any other file or folder